


John's No Good, Very Bad Day

by phooykazooi



Series: Starstruck [2]
Category: Homestuck, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Armus is Not, John Egbert is a Good Friend, Not Beta Read, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24640333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phooykazooi/pseuds/phooykazooi
Summary: John finds himself on a lonely desert planet.He discovers that he likes deserts as much as he likes desserts (which is to say: he hates both).
Series: Starstruck [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/538114
Comments: 11
Kudos: 65





	John's No Good, Very Bad Day

**Author's Note:**

> Almost entirely unedited, but I've been sitting on this for literal years, so here y'all go
> 
> This is based on _Skin of Evil,_ season 1, episode 23 of _Star Trek: the Next Generation_.

John opens his eyes to an unearthly red sky. Cloudless and unlimited, he can see blood red skies stretching pout across the horizon. The wind here is stale, There is not a cloud to be seen and John can see the strange sky unhindered. Despite it clearly being afternoon, the sky is a deep red, as though during sunset on Earth. Beneath him, John feels sand shifting with every breath and every stray breeze. 

For several minutes, John does nothing but lay there and stare up at the strange red sky. Soon, he becomes more aware of the harsh sunlight bearing down on him, how tight his skin is beginning to feel from the sunlight. He sighs and slowly sits up, wincing at the aches and pains he has acquired from killing imps and breaking SBURB. 

After taking stock of himself, John looks harder at his surroundings and concludes that he is far from Dave’s Land of Heat and Clockwork. There is not a drop of lava to be found, no huge gears to serve as platforms. Instead, there is a shit-ton of sand dunes. Stretching to the horizon, as far as John can observe, sand glowing red under the alien sun. The air is chillier than John would expect from a desert planet, the breeze blowing cool against his skin. Then again, John knows very little about deserts, let alone a desert planet. Still, he is thankful for the hood of his uniform and the long sleeves to keep the sun off his skin. 

John slowly sits up and shakes what sand he can out of his clothing, running his hands through his hair to dislodge the sand there, too. His glasses are a little dirty, but undamaged. He uses them to connect to Pesterchum via his Serious Business Goggles.

ghostlyTrickster 

GT: hey, guys!

GT: uh, hello?

GT: oh, geez, it looks like i’m the first to sign in, huh?

GT: well, i think i did the scratch thingie and i seem to have been teleported to a desert planet

GT: if anyone has any info, that could seriously help a guy out, y’know?

EVERYONE IS IDLE

John sighs and powers down the device. He slowly stands, and wipes off any sand lingering on his pants. He guesses he might as well find the inhabitants of this planet while he waits for a reply. He pulls the Breeze to him and hops onto a solid current. The Breeze here is as arid as its planet, but it is friendly and willing to assist its Heir, lifting him happily to the clouds. So far above the ground, John now has a bird’s eye view of the desert. He doesn’t like what he finds. The desert seems to stretch on for miles, from one horizon to the next. 

“Well, shit,” he murmurs into the Breeze. He puts his back to the sun and flies. 

\--

He flies for hours before he finds a hint of civilization. He spies an old road winding between the sandy hills, seeming abandoned. There are potholes bigger than himself and whole sections of road have been consumed by the elements. It may be a lost cause, but John follows it anyway, hoping to find a town.

He does, indeed, find a dilapidated town. It is so small it barely constitutes the word _town,_ but he sees what he thinks used to be residential buildings and a tiny downtown area. He hovers above, searching for movement, a person out walking or some kind of vehicle roaming. But no matter how long he stares or how hard he squints, he can see no signs of life. He was not aware that ghost towns were an actual thing outside of television. This place, though, must be a ghost town. 

He heads to the first building he sees. One of its walls have partially collapsed, but the inside of the building is mostly preserved. Save for the sand dune brought in via the gaping hole in the wall, there is little other damage, but John is not holding up much hope for untarnished supplies. 

There is, true to John’s prediction, zilch. He can find nothing that seemed edible; all of the meats are in strange, bright colors and the fruit in sharp shapes. The meat, he gave a wide berth, but the fruit he decided to stash in his sylladex. The card at the front of his deck is expelled, bounces off the empty shelves that once contained the fruit, and embeds itself into the wall. As John watches, cracks spiderweb from the card, and a third of the wall crumbles. The card, no longer supported, drops onto the remains of the wall. 

“Whoops,” says John, having forgotten about his admittedly dangerous fetch modus. He goes to retrieve it but pauses when something outside catches his eye. Across the empty space he had inadvertently created, in the previously empty space of the open area outside the building (a parking lot, maybe? Do aliens even have parking lots?) he sees what seems like spilled oil. He squints at it, confused. He was one hundred percent certain that there wasn’t anything in the parking lot except sand. 

“Huh,” says John. He grabs the card and floats out through the new doorway he accidentally created, approaching the substance cautiously. It looks like an oil spill, thick and oozing in the alien sunshine.No, thinks John, it doesn’t look like an oil spill. It looks like the goop from imps. Anything that looks like that can’t be good, he decides, and hops onto the Breeze with the intention of finding another town to scavenge for supplies. 

He’s several feet in the air when something takes his ankle in a vice grip and pulls him to the surface with such force he collides with the sandy ground. He looks at what has him and sees a shadowed tentacle tight around him. He grunts and absconded with such force the strange oily ... _thing_ releases him. He rockets into the air, not stopping until he’s brushing the stratosphere, where the Breeze morphs into a cold and foreign wind, unfamiliar but friendly. Only then, cocooned in the protective atmosphere of the planet does he pause and wonder about the beings who used to live there. 

He cruises on the edge for a while, looking down at the curvature of the planet. The Breeze whispers tales of the life it held, of the microbes that survived the formation of the solar system, the life that flourished once the climate was stable and liquid water condensed into oceans, of the mountains and valleys it passes. It murmurs of the beings that once called the planet home. Its whispers sound like loneliness. 

John closes his eyes and sleeps bathed in starlight. He dreams that when he exhales, his breath expands to every corner of the planet, from the highest mountain to the deepest trench. He dreams that a single, star-tipped flower sprouts from the shade of a mountain on the other side of the planet. John dreams of breathing life into a dead world.

\--

When he comes to, feeling reenergized and lungs strangely full, the sun has set in the north and the stars are winking down at him. His throat is dry and really wants some water. He feels compelled to follow the wind currents southward, where he dreamed of liquid water. He travels for hours before the Breeze lowers him to a stream gurgling cheerfully. He drinks greedily and when his thirst is quenched, checks Pesterchum once more. Nothing. He sighs. 

There’s nothing for it, he supposes, except to keep moving. He’ll scour the rest of the planet for any information of where it is he’s landed, but should he find nothing, John resolves to take to the stars. Last night, when he had been on the edge of sleep, he had felt the call of a strange wind far above him, past the gravitational pull of the barren planet. It was a wind that sang softly of empty space and vast potential, one that blended easily with the Breeze that he was more familiar with, but that had a different, lingering tune. It called and called, but John was not afraid of it. 

He hopped and the Breeze and intended to continue with the plan to find info, but was stopped when a being made of oil and gross things loomed over him. 

[Armus drags John back to the ground and begins to envelop him. John uses the windy thing to blow it off and run away, but is Pursued.]

“Hey, knock it off!” John shouts, uncaptaloguing his Hammerkind. “I’m just minding my own business here, you got no right being so...aggressive!! I’m just gonna find out where my friends are, then I’ll be on my way!!!”

The creature pauses. Its voice sounds like the personification of a _really bad oil spill,_ and John’s planet is the Land of Wind and Shade, so he _totally_ knows what he’s talking about. “You have the means to do so? Once you collect these ... _others,_ you have the ability to leave this wretched place?”

Here, John hesitates. He had been so set on finding his friends, _all_ of them, that he hadn’t put any thought of how to get to them in the first place. There is no doubt in his mind, brought to the forefront of his mind by his strange new understanding of himself since godtiering, that he can simply hop on the winds and breeze out this planet’s atmosphere and be unharmed. This feeling is as strong as his sense of the wind, that nothing there could harm him should he choose to travel among the stars. But what of someone who has not achieved god tier? Do those same rules, same certainties, pass on to a passenger? Can he safely ferry someone else into space?

“I don’t know,” he admits. “ _I_ can. I think. I mean, I’m pretty sure I can, but I dunno if I can go _with_ someone in space and protect them at the same time.”

The creature expands, growing momentarily larger, as though it were fidgeting. “I can assist, I think. I can provide for you the ability to leave and go elsewhere, away from this world, while in a vessel to protect your _companions._ I will provide for you this, for one service: I come with you.”

John frowns. “But why do you want to leave? Isn’t this your home?”

“ _Home?”_ repeats the entity, scathingly. “This has never has been a home for me. Look around you, boy, and observe. The desolation of this place, devoid entirely of life--it is no home!”

John swallows, looks around at the desert with new dread. “You mean--it’s like this everywhere? This isn’t--this isn’t just a desert region? There is more besides this desert, right?”

“More beyond this desert?” Here, it sounds darkly amused. “Whatever you have seen of this world, I assure you there is nothing _but_ desert. This has been so since my creation by those that came before. They destroyed themselves and in doing so destroyed their home. This desert you see consumed the planet; it has eaten the oceans, the seas, the rivers. There is nothing _but_ the desert.” The entity moves across the sand, it's dark, roiling body stark against the ground, an alien planet’s afternoon skies. 

“So, you want off this planet because there’s nothing left here for you?” John says, following the entity’s movement. “You’re trapped, is what you’re saying.”

The entity does not respond. It circles John, the silhouette of an unseen predator beneath an ocean of sand. Finally, it says with a voice like it’s rising from a bottomless abyss, from the darkest deep-sea trench, “Yes.” 

John thinks of Vriska: narcissistic, pushy, and acting as though in the best interest of others. He knows that Vriska isn’t the nicest of people, that she can cause problems without being aware of the problems in the first place. He thinks of her as he watches the flat dimensions of this being, of its insidious movements, of its holier-than-thou attitude and says, “Sure.”

  
  


\----------------

The entity leads him to the ruins of a sprawling space station. The complex is a mile long or more, but the people who came before built it to last. He floats through dilapidated hallways and dusty conference rooms, peaks into dark chambers filled to the brim with dead technology. 

“You said there was a ship?” John questions.

“Correct,” it gurgles.

“Um, are you _sure_ it’ll work?” Though thrilled at the idea of seeing a _real live space ship,_ John is dubious. 

“It is operational.”

“Oh, well, that’s good. But if it’ll take off, how come you haven’t used it?”

The creature makes a truly horrific noise, like the squilch of a piece of shit accidentally stepped in. “The _people_ barred me from entry. I have been...prevented.”

 _That’s not ominous,_ John thinks with a grimace.

The ship is about twice the size of a school bus. He is reminded of a helicopter, or one of those high-tech drone things that Jade likes to tinker with. It has been weathered by time, but the creature assures John it will not burn at terminal velocity and that it is more than operational. A shuttle, the creature calls it.

“Does it have a name?” John asks as they circle the machine.

“No,” it blithely replies. The entity crawls over the slate-gray surface, slips into crevices in an effort to locate the landing pad. The ramp opens with a hydraulic hiss, and John eagerly bounces inside. It is minimalist and impersonal, dormant. “This way,” it continues, reforming itself into the vaguely humanoid form it seems to favor.

John follows, his head on a swivel. He is lead to what must be the control panel, a black screen in front of—John gasps. “The captain’s chair!” He flounces to the seat and happily sits in the chair, face nearly split in half with the force of his smile. “Oh, wow,” he says, hitting buttons indiscriminately. The panel lights up under his fingertips and the shuttle comes to life beneath his feet. 

“Be careful,” the creature snaps, just as John slaps a big red button.

“Oh, _re_ lax,” he laughs.

Unfortunately, neither really get the opportunity, because the ramp unceremoniously shuts, the engines burn, and they lift up, screaming at eachother in sudden terror.

Well, John doesn’t feel too scared, to be honest. He screams with delight as they break atmosphere and peel away from the planet.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> the end is rushed, but that's okay. please don't mind the errors, ill fix them eventually


End file.
